The Powerful Impact of Candidate Connections: Why and How to Build a Positive Candidate Experience

Searching for powerful, but simple ways to improve your candidate experience?

Watch this episode of Let’s Talk Hiring with Josh Tolan, CEO at Spark Hire, Gary Schwake, CRO at Spark Hire, and guest speaker Tracy St. Dic, Global Head of Talent at Zapier.

Discover hands-on strategies and practical best practices to enhance every stage of your candidate journey, from application to onboarding.

Welcome. Here we are. Another edition of Let’s Talk Hiring, and we’re very, very thrilled to have Tracy from Zapier with us. Some of you may know that we did a webinar just last week with select software reviews.

Tracy was kind enough to be with us, and somehow we got her to come back again. And, so we’re we’re we’re thanking our lucky stars for that. So thank you, Tracy. But before we jump into a quick introduction from Tracy, would love to hear just from where you’re, where you’re joining us from.

What what part of the world? Just put that in the chat real quick. Let us know. Say hi.

And if you’re a SparkHire customer, add a little flame emoji for us too. That’ll be fun. So let us know. But while that’s happening, Tracy, I guess I’m from Charlotte, North Carolina.

That’s where I’m coming in from.

And I am coming to you from Los Angeles, California.

There we go.

I am in Highland Park, Illinois. I dropped it in the chat. So we kinda cover coast to coast here.

Yeah. We got all the time. What all the one time zone. So, well, as we do that, Tracy, it would be great to just, you know, just for the for the benefit of the group, just a quick overview of, you know, your your role at Zapier, how long you’ve been there, and actually actually preceding that a little bit. Like, what what brought you to that point? I think the career arc is always really interesting.

Oh, gosh. So I actually started my career as a kindergarten teacher in Brooklyn through a program called Teach for America.

And I had not at all imagined that I would be in a classroom in education, but I was deeply, deeply invested in education in this country and then fell in love And with so teaching, I always say, I think jump started my interest and passion in talent. Teaching is so much like talent, right? It is cultivating incredible talent. It’s nurturing it.

It’s identifying it. It’s ensuring that talent can have the right environment to thrive. The same is true in kindergarten as it is in working with people and organizations. And so started my career as a teacher, felt so deeply about the mission.

I actually joined as a recruiter for Teach for America out here in Southern California. And then I was with for America on staff for over thirteen years. Eventually, I was the SVP of recruitment, leading all of our national recruitment efforts and responsible for the largest and most diverse teacher pipeline in the country, which we’re really proud of. And our mission was to ensure that all children had access to an excellent education.

From there, I actually joined Zapier, and I’ve been at Zapier for just over three years. And I’m the global head of talent, so I lead functions of I like to say anything with talent in the title. So talent acquisition, talent intelligence, employer talent branding, diversity partnerships, all of our internal mobility strategies and pathways. And what’s very cool is some of our big overall talent initiatives at Zapier.

Zapier is, by the way, the most connected orchestration platform, and we just focus on helping people and companies use AI and automation in really practical and human centered ways to make this technology accessible for everyone. So that’s what I’m doing now. And I always see the connection between my work at Teach For America and Zapier as really ensuring that everyone has access to either the opportunities that they need in their lives, whether it’s an excellent education or access to this really life changing, game changing technology.

So good. And I’ve heard that background before, and I’m always just so the the connection is while at first seems so crazy going from teaching to, you know, high-tech recruiting, but that level of empathy that I’m sure that that that you were able to develop, right, especially in in a program like teach for America, that is very service forward, right, and about about about the the the students and what they need and how they can be successful. And as you pointed out, the environment, taking that same same level of empathy to a corporate talent environment, I’m sure, which is the perfect foundation for what we’re gonna get into today on a candidate experience.

So Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not distributed. And some of our roles as talent leaders is to ensure that we’re providing opportunities for people to have access to these life changing opportunities too.

Excellent.

Yeah. I love the parallel between teaching and recruitment because I think often recruitment you know, is confused for being a more, like, sales oriented job of where you have to sell the candidate on coming to the company. But really, you’re an adviser, and you’re nurturing, and you’re cultivating those relationships, as you said. And it’s, I think, very similar. There’s a lot of parallels, at least, with teaching. So thanks for sharing that background.

Yeah. And, before we dive in, though, we we pop a question on the screen if, Patrick can do that for us. He’s back there. And we just would like to know if you guys what is top of mind for you and your team when it comes to candidate experience?

So if you didn’t know you’re joining a Let’s Talk Hiring workshop about the importance of candidate experience. So let’s, hear from you just, you know, what you’re seeing there, and, we can we’re happy to answer your questions. And and also too, as we go, feel free to drop your questions into the chat because we will definitely, pull those out as we’re moving along, but this will be very conversational in nature. So, but, we can, jump right in here.

Yeah. And as as people think about that, Gary alluded to the fact that, Tiffany and I we’re we’re on a Tracy and I were on a Tiffany, our content manager. Tracy and I were on a webinar last week talking about AI, which I also talked to Tiffany a lot about. And that was really what was top of mind for us as as we, you know, were thinking about the candidate experience is, like, how do we maintain these human connections in this like AI enabled world that we’re in and how do we you know keep transparency and authenticity at the forefront so I’m sure that’ll be know, some of the stuff we talk about today. I know that’s definitely what’s what’s top of mind for me.

Yep. Indeed. Well, let’s say so let’s jump in here real quick. So, let’s just have a especially today, like, the candidate experience has always been something that we’ve talked about. But as Josh just alluded to, the the environment in which we now sit where many people remote, we have a lot of screens. There’s, know, a lot of automation and workflows and things.

Now more than ever, it seems the candidate experience is something that is non optional. So can you maybe, Tracy, just in your I’m sure even three year experience just at Zapier alone and even going back prior to that to to teach for America. Just talk a little bit about how you’ve seen that evolved and what’s really what’s really jumped out to you at, like, places where organizations should really think about investing.

Well, I think candidate experience is absolutely paramount. I mean, as you said, you know, I started my career at teach For America, and believe me, there’s nothing more difficult than convincing a college senior who’s about to head off to med school or take a job at Google to put those plans at hold and spend at least two years teaching in a low income school. It is a blessing that I hone my recruiter chops that way because one thing that I always say is that every time you speak to a candidate, it is an opportunity to cultivate them. And candidate experience is paramount.

If you are a company that doesn’t believe that, then you are certainly gonna be behind because hiring is such a two way street even now. The best candidates have so many options that has never changed. And you’re not just evaluating them, they’re evaluating you. So if the process feels unclear or slow or dismissive, it sends a message, and it’s not the message you want.

So for example, at Zapier, one of our candidate commitments is that you will hear from us every seven days. We try our absolute best to do that. We miss it sometimes, but we we really aim for that. We track it because we know that ghosting or delays can cost you great people, and it’s not a great experience for the candidate.

A thoughtful experience earns trust and trust attracts talent. And I think that’s the piece that is always really top of mind for our team.

Yeah, and so you talked to that’s the communication there. And I think the other thing that you really hit on recently as well is just the transparency right up front, like setting those expectations. I am I am sure go back to your teach for America example.

I am sure that some of the candidates you’re talking to really have no idea what what that looks like. And there’s probably a whole bunch of questions and trepidation around, wait a minute, I had this wasn’t even on my radar.

So how do I even think about this? And and then what’s that process look like?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you are often the first person that candidates meet from your company. And so what felt like nice to have, let’s try to create a good candidate experience, but the companies have all the power, that’s just not the case anymore.

And again, in my example with Teach for America, it was absolutely flipped. People often didn’t know about Teach for America or didn’t know what it was like to be a teacher in a classroom, had never considered it. They were going to grad school or they were going to this other corporate job or whatever it was. And so you really have to help people not only understand your company, but also help them understand what it could be like for them to be in that role, to imagine themselves at your company, in that experience, in that role, working on that team.

And so I would just say this is not a nice to have anymore. It’s kind of the cost of entry for for, companies. Candidates really expect, as you said, transparency. They expect clarity and respect.

And they wanna know not only about your company, but what to expect in your process, how decisions are made, and how their time’s gonna be valued. So even the small things like not knowing where they stand in the process can erode that confidence. So all to say is I agree with you. They need clarity about the organization and and what you’re offering them, what your value proposition is, but they also need clarity about how you’re gonna treat them in the process because that is a huge signal for how it’s gonna be when they’re actually at the company too.

For sure. And I think that’s the thing that’s often confused.

People wanna say it’s an employer market or a candidate market, and there are certainly dynamics at play that Sure. Give people those mixed messages. But the reality is it’s always a candidate market. At the end of the day Yeah.

If you’re an employer, you have this goal of hiring somebody and getting to a good hiring outcome. The final decision is lies with the candidate that you made that offer to. Like, you may think we’re the employer. We’re gonna be eventually employing this person.

We’re gonna be paying them. We’re getting tons of applicants. We have all the power. But just remember that the decision at the end of this process sits with the candidate, and all the candidates that you engage with throughout the process might be future candidates for the organization as well, or you may interact within a recruiting role down the line at a different organization.

So candidates don’t just remember the employing organization, but they also remember the people on the recruiting team that they interacted with, you know, as they go to other opportunities, as you did, right, from teach, for America to Zapier down the line. But I think that’s an important thing is, like, people like to talk about this candidate or employer market. And I just think it’s always a candidate led market, and everything you should be doing should be aligned with, of course, what do we need to get to as an outcome as the company, but also what’s best for the candidate? How do I best advise them and nurture them through this process so they can make the best decision at the end of the day so we mutually get to a good fit at the end of this process?

Right. And I think to your point is even if it is a, quote, company driven market, you should still treat it as if it’s a candidate driven market. Because to your point, for all the reasons you said, it really is. I mean, there’s a lot of nuance, but sometimes I like to say we’re in a candidate conscious market.

So even in a more conscious or cautious hiring climate, candidates are asking sharper questions. You know, what’s the culture really like? Will I be how will I be supported? How did you treat candidates during the last downturn? And how did you treat employees during your last rift? Like that is why candidate experience really matters because any piece of this process either builds or breaks trust. And so I think that that’s just such an important point that you said is if you’re always thinking about treating candidates as if this isn’t a candidate driven market, I think it will serve you a lot better in the long run.

So I’m gonna this is perfect timing. So and forgive me, Shalise, if I mispronounce your name, but what are some additional ways your organization can enhance the the candidate experience? And, actually, as I was thinking about a question as well is that for many listening and and certainly those with whom SparkHire works, they’re across a spectrum of company sizes and types since many of them are, you know, organizations with maybe 50 to 500 employees that don’t necessarily have a lot of the the the certainly benefit from the brand that Zapier has as an example.

And they they are so busy working in the process. It’s hard to work on the process. So if we were gonna, you know, take a step back and start to define these touch points that create the candidate experience, maybe even from the beginning, places where we could really lean in and, like, you know, this little thing here creates an outsized impact from the back to your point about empathy to the candidate. Like, this means a ton. And if you spend some time there, that will provide outsized impact to the candidate.

Yeah. Well, I think you actually said it starts with empathy. Like, what does the candidate what does the experience feel like from the candidate side? Is it clear, respectful, timely?

Is it human? You know, at Zapier, we aim for processes that are, we like structured but flexible and personable but scalable. And we ask ourselves, would we feel good going through this process? Would this be a process that attracts top talent?

And to be honest, sometimes we step back and the answer is, nope. This process would not attract top talent. We are putting people through many hoops and, they they won’t wanna do that. And so we have to work with our hiring managers to adjust.

But I think that question anchors everything from the emails we send to the assessments we use. But just to get really concrete and because I think it’s such a great question is I think your candidate experience gosh. It’s hard to think of anything that isn’t a part of the candidate So without going too broad, you know, I’m always thinking about the candidate journey and how they come into your process. So what does your website say?

What does your career pages say? What are your LinkedIn or Glassdoor or, you know, fill in the blank job board say about your company? How are you showcasing not only what you wanna tell candidates, but what your employees are actually saying about your company? Because there has to be a balance of, I wanna say this and but this is the reality.

I think of that as a difference between, like, employer brand and and candidate brand. So I think there’s a whole bunch of things you can do up front. Then I think in the process, a big one for us is building for transparency. So when a recruiter first meets with a candidate, explain who is involved.

Explain the whole process up front. Who’s gonna be involved? What is each step for? So if you have like, we do many steps in your process.

Why is each step important? I have some recruiters who at the bottom of every email, they actually, you know, keep in the bottom of every email, here’s the process for this role, here’s where you are in it. Just as a reminder for any email they send, they’re just reminding people, yep. You’re in step four, but this is a, you know, seven step process.

And then throughout that, I think we give feedback wherever we can. So even if someone doesn’t move forward, we want them to understand why. We want our experience to be learning for them. So we really try to, throughout the way, build in these personal touch points, whether it’s ongoing cultivation or feedback for candidates, whether they’re moving forward or not, that actually just bring that human personal touch.

And then throughout the process also, we’re really thinking about how do you make sure that the interviews are structured, interviewers show up on time, interviewers are giving candidates a chance to ask questions. We use BrightHire as a platform to, to record all of our video transcripts. And one of the things I really like about BrightHire is as a talent leader, I can actually track, like, how many of my interviews started on time, what was the talk ratio, were there any high risk questions that were asked. So those are things that I can then dig into that we can use to coach interviewers. Because sometimes your recruiting team or a lot of time, your recruiting team doesn’t have control over the whole process. A lot of your candidate experience and your brand comes out in the skills assessment or that job fit interview with the hiring manager. And so you have to pay attention to those details as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I think there were so many good things in there. And, Tracy, I think the thing that you hit on, and I think, Gary, to your point is, look.

There’s a lot of companies that aren’t gonna have the resources or the brand of Zapier, and you’ve been able to build over the course of years. Right? This is not something you and the team have built overnight, but over the course of years, continuously iterate and optimize the candidate experience. So for, you know, an employer or somebody that’s here with a company that’s 75 employees and is just starting to dig into the candidate experience and realizing the importance of it and trying to figure out where do we start.

I think you nailed it in terms of bringing transparency to the hiring process. Like, there’s so many things you can do to improve candidate experience both within the process and evaluating every single touch point to, as you said, evaluating if interviewers are showing up on time and what types of questions are they asking, all those kinds of things.

But at the end of day, if there’s something that you could do tomorrow without any extra resources, it’s literally just demystify the hiring process Yeah.

For the candidates that are going through it. Like, just tell them what the process is and where they stand and give them as much detail as you possibly can. And that doesn’t require any outside help. That’s just you documenting and providing that information to candidates.

And so to me, that’s, like, always a thing to come back to. When in doubt, just ask yourself, like, what do candidates need to know? What information do they need to make better decisions about us as an employer and about the process? And if you just keep providing that information, you’re gonna keep making improvements and taking steps forward.

And that alone is gonna get you, like, way better than the baseline of employers that are out there that, you know, aren’t providing all of that information and transparency. So I think, Tracy, to your point, that’s where it starts. And then over time, as you and your team have done, you can start to implement all these other ways to improve the candidate experience. But if the hiring process is still a black box to candidates and they don’t know what to expect, Everything else you do and all the work you do on the process or everything else you do downstream, it really doesn’t matter as much because there’s still a lack of clarity for candidates as they go through your process.

Yeah. And, so Shalise asked a good follow-up question, which is perfect, which is the in the in the absence of information, us as humans fear the worst. Right? So that that point about transparency being so powerful.

So now we’re we’re in an AI era, and both we talked about this last week. Right? We have candidates, of course, using AI, and there are sometimes spoken and unspoken expectations of what that might look like speaking back to transparency. But then there’s also, excuse me, some tools that we’re using on our end that that create that fear of the unknown.

So as we think about this, you know, new world of of AI supported decisions, what Tracy would love to obviously, you guys sit at the the epicenter of this as a company, not just to mention from a from a hiring perspective.

How have you if you think back to how you started to introduce some of these tools and workflows into your process, like, from a candidate experience perspective, what were some of the things that you were thinking through to make sure that you had that transparency? And then, Josh, I wanna kick it over to you because, obviously, we have, at Spark higher perspective on that as well.

Right. It’s such a good question because I honestly think we at Zapier and we in the industry can do a lot more to help candidates understand how we utilize AI and for what purposes. And I think that if we did a better job of that and, again, I’m I’m giving feedback to myself because we need to do this as well. If we do a better job of that, we’ll actually help candidates understand, like, who is still at the center of the decision making.

At Zapier, we really believe you can delegate the responsive the account sorry. You can delegate the task, but you can’t delegate the accountability. And so we use I mean, at Zapier, we use Zapier, of course, to to automate things like interview reminders, scheduling follow ups, sending welcome emails. I mean, we use it across the board, but the key is thoughtful automation and thoughtful AI enablement, freeing up time so recruiters and hiring managers can focus on those higher touch moments.

And I think if you explain that to candidates and say, you know, this is where I’m gonna be in the loop, and also you might get some, you know, automated reminders about your interview and some automated prep things, I think that candidates think that’s okay. Because the reality is is all of these tools are meant to help us focus on those higher touch moments. A really good example of this, for example, on my team is candidate feedback.

I think that candidate feedback is drastically underutilized as a candidate experience lever.

So many candidates are grateful for any bit of feedback they can understand of why they didn’t move forward in the process because they wanna get better for the next process. So we really take that seriously. And as long as you as certain parts of the process, we give as much feedback as we can. It used to take my recruiters a very long amount of time, like at least thirty minutes or so per candidate to read through all the scorecards again, create a summary of the feedback, put it in an email, and share that.

And using an AI assisted tool, we’re able to summarize more quickly the data that we have from the interviews. Recruiters check it and be like, yep. That was the feedback, and we send it off in an email. So we’re able to actually personalize more and give a better candidate experience by using the tools versus if we didn’t have them, recruiters just don’t time to go that in-depth.

They’d probably give very high level vague things. And so I think, again, to this point around transparency, it’s helpful for candidates to understand why and how we use it. But we’ve also seen that if we’re using it in really smart ways to aid decisions, surface insights, analyze things, but not to actually make the decision, then that’s that’s truly where the human in the loop should needs to be continued.

Yeah. I I totally agree. And and that’s what we say here is you are not hiring with AI. You’re using AI to hire.

And I think there’s a difference between I’ve heard a newsletter this morning.

There’s a difference between augmentation and automation. And that’s not to say you can’t use automation because, certainly, you should automate parts of the process or parts of the job that free you up, to insert the skills that you have as a recruiter into the areas that matter most. So I think it’s really important to, you know, give candidates those guidelines of how you’re using it. Because, again, going back to demystifying the hiring process, if you don’t, people will make their own assumptions.

And, usually, those assumptions lead to negative sentiment because they assume the worst. And so I think the more you can clarify how you’re using AI in the process and how it actually leads to a better or more fair or faster process for the candidate, that will resonate. So, again, it just goes back to transparency. The more you can think about, like, literally tomorrow, open a Google Doc or something and just think about what questions would candidates have.

Let me just, like, riff on an FAQ of all the candidates, all the questions candidates might have for us throughout the hiring process and just answer them. And then you just gotta think about how do we weave that into our regular communication with the candidates or put it on our website so we can link to it.

And I think, again, that’s just, like, puts you such a step ahead of so many employers who aren’t doing that and leave everything up for the candidate to interpret and assume themselves.

Exactly.

And with that in mind, Tracy, back, you know, three years ago, which is crazy to think that, like, AI was just this hypothetical theoretical example out in, the nuclear physics world and suddenly boom, it hits the scene and it’s everywhere. But go go back from the beginning. And as you stepped into that, like, what were the areas through the process as you evaluated at Zapier that you saw an opportunity to, like, step in? Maybe at certain parts of the process, or maybe it was you mentioned hiring managers and, you know, having less control over that experience. What were some areas where you stepped in? And, you know, I guess for those that are waiting into that for the first time, what would you recommend? Where would you recommend they start now that you’ve been through it?

Oh, gosh. Well, I think it it starts with really understanding and auditing your whole process and then figuring out which are the pieces of friction that would feel not great for a candidate. And so one of the things that I saw at Zapier when I stepped in is at the time I came in in 2022, I mean, again, 2022, we were still doing huge hiring volume, growing really rapidly as many many tech companies were before the downturn. And what I really saw is that we were putting so much trust in our hiring managers and in our interviewers as we should, but we had so many new interviewers just jumping in because we had so much hiring to do.

And so that was a big piece that I wanted to focus on right away is how can we kind of pull back and look at how our interviewers are doing, what sort of training might they need, how can we train them on unconscious bias and creating an inclusive candidate experience? So just little things like that are saying, this is gonna help the whole. Because if I can train all of our interviewers or hiring managers on how to run a good process, then we’ll have a bit of more of a scalable model when we need all those interviewers to jump in at the last minute. So that was one.

I think the other thing is creating SLAs both for service level agreements, both for you and the hiring team. How quickly are you gonna give feedback? How quickly do you need to turn in your scorecards?

You know, what sort of what can we expect from each side from recruiting and from hiring? So that was one that I feel like we had to shore up really quickly as well as us focus on what’s our commitment to candidates. So we have things, like I mentioned before, a seven day commitment to candidates because we don’t wanna ghost them. We have commitments to feedback.

We have commitments to transparency throughout the process. Right? So those are some of the things where we sort of philosophically got aligned first. And then we started to introduce how can we make these processes more consistent?

And how can I, as a talent leader, also get more insight into what our recruiters are saying and doing and where they need to level up? And that’s honestly where we we implemented a video recording tool and, transcript tool like BrightHire. But even if you’re just listening to Zoom recordings, I think you can do that and and really support your candidates. Because, again, it’s not about the shiny things and the, like, marketing that you put in front of candidates. It’s really about the human experience they have with the humans that are doing the hiring process. It’s really about the connection that they’re having with your company. Like, yes, you can have better looking materials and you can give more clarity on your website, but it is so much about the experience that people have one on one too.

That’s such a good point. And Josh has heard me say this ad nauseam that all frustration is the result of unmet expectations. Yeah. So if you don’t set expectations, like, they are being set. Like, expectations are being set whether you set them or not. And so that whole idea around SLA both internally as well as what are we gonna commit to the candidate is a that’s such a great seemingly obvious, you know, foundation with which to start, but so many people overlook that because we all assume we’re on the same page until you ask other people in the process and you realize you have different different perspectives.

Yeah. Totally. I think you bring up a great point, Tracy, because a lot of folks, when they think about improving candidate experience, will rush to the process itself. Like, okay.

Let me think about all the friction points in the process and try and solve those. And quickly, you find yourself underwater because you realize there’s a lot of friction, and then you try and boil the ocean and solve all those friction points. And you can’t you just can’t do it all at once. And you really can’t do it if you don’t have alignment with the rest of the organization about what you’re actually trying to accomplish by doing that.

So I think the it sounds like the approach that you guys took was more about starting from the beginning of, like, what do we believe the process should be as a company? What are the principles? What are the guiding principles that we believe in? What are the pillars of the hiring process? What is the information that candidates need? We need to align on that internally as a company. Then we need to figure out how do we message that externally to the world, and that’s putting it on our website and in our job descriptions and in our emails where we’re laying out the process.

And then we think about how do we actually live that out through our process. And those are the SLAs that are aligned with the commitments that we’ve made to candidates and all the things that you do in the process. So I think that’s a lesson for everybody is it’s very easy to jump to the process, and there probably are some low hanging fruit easy wins there within the process.

But the reality is you’ll never build, like, a repeatable candidate experience that as you grow and more interviewers and other people are introduced to the process can adapt to unless you really start at the beginning with, like, this candidate led approach of what do we believe in, what do we believe candidates need, and how do we deliver that to them. And then the process is almost just a byproduct of all those guiding principles that you set up. And I write in thinking, like, that’s the approach you guys took.

Absolutely. Because then when you figure out what those pain points are, then you can take the next step and say, does a human need to be in the loop to do this, or can this be automated? For example, if you think it’s important that candidates can candidates need more prep before an interview so that they can put their best foot forward because that is what would help a candidate be set up to thrive in your interview process, then great. You’ve identified that you wanna add a step where you’re connecting with the candidate about prep. Now does that need to be a human live on the phone? Is that an email? Is that something that can be automated?

Like, are the things that I think you can think about tactically once you understand what your values are, what your philosophy is. And to your point, you don’t have to tackle everything at once. There’s probably pieces that are pain points within your process that would make a big difference to candidates. Just sending that thoughtful note before an interview or sending some feedback.

Right? So again, we’re not boiling the ocean, but finding those pain points and then saying, okay. Now based off of that, what are the different tactics I could do to ensure that not only is that easy for recruiters, but it’s seamless for candidates? And could that be automated?

Could that be AI enabled?

Yep.

Yeah. Great point.

I think that’s where people fall into the trap of, like, AI for AI’s sake when you just immediately rush Yeah.

To address this one friction point in the process versus thinking about things from a big picture and what are you trying to actually accomplish and what outcomes are you actually focused on. Yeah. So I love that. We we did have a question in the chat from Denise Anthony. Denise, thank you for joining. It’s great to see you here.

And she asked, how do you evaluate candidates for AI knowledge? And I know this deviates slightly maybe from what, you know, we we had planned to talk about next, but I wanna jump into it because, one, I think Zapier has an unbelievable story related to this. But two, it does relate to the candidate experience because I think the way that you guys have approached as a company is exactly what we’re talking about right now in terms of transparency and putting that information out into the world and making sure candidates know how you what your expectations are in the hiring process for AI fluency and how you are actually evaluating that.

And I’ve seen posts from you, I think your chief people officer, maybe your CEO, like multiple people from Zapier, not just you putting that out into the world, which I think is, again, back to the point of getting everybody aligned, on the principles of hiring. You guys have done a great job at that at Zapier. So I know it’s a big question. How do you evaluate candidates for AI knowledge?

But you guys are an AI company. So maybe just, like, from the top, like, little bit of a rundown of what you guys are doing right now with regards to that.

Right. Okay. So you might have to cut me off, Josh or Gary, because I talk about this for hours. This has been my my whole life for the past few months.

So, yes. So Zapier is an AI orchestration platform. We dog food our own product. And so it is so important for us that we are moving in the direction as a company, not just with our product, but as a company of being more AI first, AI forward in everything that we do, because that’s down the line, only gonna benefit our product and how we provide value for our customers.

So as a company, we decided that’s important. And so backtracking from that, we needed to figure out how are we then in the hiring process ensuring that we are vetting for this ability to, you know, contribute in the way that we need as an AI first company. And so we said that back in May, we said 100% of our hires need to beat a minimum bar of AI fluency. Now what does that mean?

How would we define AI fluency? We define it in three ways, three pillars that we look at, mindset, strategic acumen, and builder skills. And I would actually say mindset and strategic acumen are even more important because the technology is changing so quickly. Who’s a great builder now on AI might not be the best builder in six months.

And if you’ve never used AI before, you could be an expert in six months. It’s like, that’s how rapidly it’s moving. So we look at those things, mindset, strategic acumen, and builder skills. And we evaluate that in the process in multiple ways.

We start at the application process. We do it in the recruiter screen, in the skills assessment, regardless of the role. So we even have a skills assessment that is for nontechnical roles, your tax accountants, your recruiters. And then we also evaluate it in the executive interview.

And that rubric is everything from capable, like or or unacceptable. You’re resistant to AI. You, you’ve used it to, you know, write poems for your kids, but you you know, don’t use it for that anything else. Capable is our minimum expectation, which is basically you use AI in really intentional ways for a purposeful outcome and ROI.

In your work, in your personal life, you can say, use it to do this, and this is what time it saves me, and this is how it makes me more productive. Adaptive is the next level, which gets more into, I use AI more regularly within my work to ensure my own personal productivity or the productivity of my team. And then transformative, which is the highest level, which is rare for candidates at this stage, is I use AI. I’m AI first.

I use AI to do everything. I approach every problem from an AI first mindset, and I transform my workflow in different ways. So that’s kind of like a a that’s like believe it or not, that’s the short version. But I would tying that back to the candidate experience is we set this minimum expectation.

We put it out there publicly and said that on our blogs. We have it on our career pages, or within our candidate communication. From the very moment that candidates apply, they get an email back saying, AI fluency is really important to us, and here’s some tools that you can use to beef up your own AI fluency, including tools from Zapier, but also Anthropix AI fluency course. Like, we want to ensure that if we’re gonna raise the expectation, we also need to raise the level of support we’re giving candidates.

And that’s where I think it ties back to the candidate experience is being transparent about what the expectations are and also being really clear about how we’re going to help you meet them so that bar is really accessible for everyone. Even if you’re starting the process from zero, we believe that throughout the process, you can actually gain a lot of traction on how you understand AI and your AI fluency. And because we believe, again, that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not equally distributed, we wanna make sure we’re doing our part to set every candidate up for success regardless of what sort of AI usage they’ve had in the future.

So that piece is really important to us, and that’s how you sort of rise, raise all boats.

Yeah. And you the the what’s seemingly so simple is so powerful, again, is that AI fluency is important, but you actually define what AI fluency means.

And not just that your the names for it, but that exhibits itself in this manner. Because that was the part of the question I was gonna go to as well is then how do you take that down so that level of consistency and, excuse me, transparency is also, to your point, the hiring managers are increasingly taking on more and more of of of a hiring responsibility just because of the nature of of the roles and leanness of t r TA teams and the like. And so how do we ensure that it’s through that that we’re all speaking the same language? Like, we all have the same definitions of what good looks like instead of it being in the eyes of the beholder. Right? And I I think that that just jumped out to me as being really powerful.

Well, Gary, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Where we put the AI fluency assessment in the process was so intentional because I knew that I could calibrate my recruiters much more quickly than I could calibrate the rest of the organization.

So we calibrated with recruiters. That’s why we screen for AI fluency in the recruiter screen. And it was also easier to calibrate our executive team to be all on the same page, and that’s why we also assess for AI fluency at the end with our executive interview. The skills assessment so that’s why we don’t do it in the hiring manager interview.

We don’t do it in other stakeholder interviews. Like, it was it was honestly thinking in terms of change management, where can I ensure, to your point, that we’re all speaking the same language and that we can be calibrated so that we can assess candidates fairly? So those were the two smallest groups of people I knew that I could get on board and understand what this what the rubric was like and what are the nuances for the rubric. And then with the skills assessment, that is a little bit more, role specific.

And so it is much easier to calibrate those specific hiring managers with that particular role, with that particular skills assessment. So, that is the the change management trick.

That was that brilliant. Brilliant.

And you you nailed the point where you said, you know, a lot of this and what you’re putting out in the world is to set candidates up for success.

Right.

And I think that goes back to the point that candidate experience is candidate led. You’re an adviser. You’re trying to guide them to success, and that’s the same thing that you would do as an employer you would want to set employees up for success so by doing things whether it’s you know demystifying the hiring process as a whole or giving very clear guidelines and what you’re evaluating for with AI by giving candidates that information. You’re setting proper expectations, and you’re setting them up for success, which is, again, what you would do in the workplace.

So why wouldn’t you do it in the interview? Because, ultimately, you’re assessing if this person’s going to be a good employee, not a good interviewer or candidate. You want to see if they’re gonna work well at your organization. So, I think it’s great that you guys, place such a strong emphasis on that.

And that’s another thing that as a company, if you’re looking to make improvements to the candidate experience, it’s just through the lens of how can I help candidates be more successful in the process? How can I give them more information to make better decisions? You’ll hear me harp on this over and over again. But that’s those are the simple steps that you can take.

And I think, you know, that leads us to the question, in the chat, which is what tips do you give candidates to help them meet those expectations? I’ve noticed that some candidates come from companies that have not allowed them to use AI in their work, so I’m curious on how you navigate that. Great question.

Yeah. So for us, like I said, you know, as soon as you apply for a role at Zapier, the confirmation you email you get back has a little bit of explanation of why AI fluency is important to us, but then also some resources. So, I mean, with AI, my personal philosophy is you just need time and curiosity to get really good at it. Most of working with AI is like just jumping into a tool, whether it’s ChatGPT or Zapier or anything else, and just starting to play around with it and starting to really poke around and give yourselves opportunities to start with low risk, low level things like, how can I get AI to help me write better or draft an email or, you know, summarize this piece of research and then allow me to write it into a memo?

Like, you can start with really small things. And so absolutely, there are definitely candidates that come from maybe financial institutions or health care where they were not allowed to utilize AI in the workplace. Totally fair. But we also believe that, one, many people are using it personally, but there’s very easy things that you can do to just start playing with it.

And in only a matter of weeks, you could actually start to not necessarily get really good at it, though you could, but you could also start to imagine how AI could influence your workflow. So that’s why when I say we look for mindset and strategic acumen in particular, mindset is, you know, are you curious about AI? Are you do you believe that AI will be a tool that is gonna be prevalent and pervasive in the future? You know, are you eager to jump in and learn it and believe that it can be useful for you?

And then the strategic acumen is the ability to envision how could AI enable my work in the future. Not necessarily I can build the tool and I can create the workflow and I can make the agent. That’s not what we’re looking for there. We’re looking for how could in my role as a tax accountant or my role as a recruiter, how could I utilize AI?

And so that’s a little bit different than saying you have to be a master at coding with Cursor. Right? So it is really different how we think about it, but our CTO always says, we wanna look at the curve and not the snapshot. It’s not necessarily where the technology is today or where the candidate is today, but what evidence do we have that they’re going to be able to learn very quickly, get really curious, experiment, and innovate once they get here.

So that is it almost sounds like it’s more like the behavioral competencies Yeah. Related to how a candidate views AI versus the hard skills. Of course, skills are factored in, but you’ve got a skills assessment as well to see if they have the skills for the role. But as you mentioned, their first two factors in some ways are more important than the builder skills, which is the last factor because behavioral competencies are really what puts somebody on that curve.

Because the skills, as you said, if you’ve got somebody that has great skills, but they don’t align with the behavioral competencies where you don’t feel confident, they’re gonna improve on those skills. Over time, very quickly, they’re passed up by somebody that is demonstrating they are motivated to learn those skills and learn them quickly. And in a matter of months with how thing everything fast everything is moving, that person is actually further along than the person that had the hard skills, at the starting line. So that’s a really interesting approach.

Yeah.

And what go ahead. Sorry, Tracy.

Go ahead.

I can say and just to very quickly tie candidate experience and supportive candidates to quality of hire, which is another topic I’m passionate about is, like, what you said, Josh, if you have a candidate who has never used AI, you give them some very clear resources at the beginning of the process.

You tell them what they’re gonna be assessed on. They very quickly learn how to utilize utilize AI in a way that they can pass the skills test in the interview. Then you’ve also gained insight from a quality of hire perspective of that is an incredible learning curve. That is incredible curiosity and hustle to learn.

Wow. Like, that is a a a trait within our organization that causes someone to be really successful here at Zapier. So there’s also Yeah. Candidate support and candidate experience can also give you more insight if you’re very clear and transparent from the beginning that can also help you understand how this candidate would do at your organization.

And so we we take that piece really seriously as well.

Yeah. In a way, it’s it’s your own version of a behavioral test. Right? And and I think what what to me is is was so we’re talking about it in the context of AI, but going back over the arc of my career and looking at other situations where, you know, and you know this from a from a your your teaching days from a student population perspective is that there are people who start at different places and have different level of expectations and exposure to things.

And so, you know, in in many ways, organizations, like, well, we just expect you to get it. Like, you should know what you need to do to prepare for an interview or what have you. But by making it transparent in terms of, like, look. This is how we this is what we think good looks like in terms of AI fluency.

And, oh, by the way, here are some resources you can have. At that point, again, it’s still up to the candidate to to, you know, take the ball and run with it. But but it’s there, and it’s available to them, and that’s what you get to observe and see. And then you get the opportunity for somebody who could be a real rock star employee for you who may not have previously had the opportunity or showed up ready to pass the AI fluency test now has that opportunity where otherwise you would have missed out on that, back to your point of quality of hire.

So but that goes beyond AI. Right? We think about any specialized knowledge or, you know, how we work as an organization or anything like that. Just being transparent about, look, this is important to us.

This is how we think about it. And here’s some things that you can do to better prepare and then watch what they do with it. That that to me was the the moment here.

Yeah. Nailed it. Yeah.

So we haven’t had a lot of time to talk about, and I know, you know, we’re gonna be up on time here in, like, ten or so minutes. Let’s talk about process, though. Right? So we’ve talked about guiding principles.

We’ve talked about AI. I wanna jump into a little bit of process where we get a little tactical Okay. As you think about end to end, you know, starting with the application, you know, all the way through offer, maybe we’ll get there, in this conversation. Maybe we won’t.

But, as you think about the process, you mentioned previously looking for friction points within the process to focus on, to improve the candidate experience.

Somebody’s looking at their own hiring process after this webinar.

Where should they start? Is there specific data they should look at? What should they do if they don’t have the data?

Somebody’s just starting with the blank page. How do they figure out where the bottlenecks are to improve the candidate experience?

Yeah. Well, again, I think data is so important. And so I maybe I would even say, because I care deeply about data and data infrastructure, is if you don’t have data about your candidate experience, start thinking now about what things you can do to have data about your candidate experience, whether that is quantitative and you’re looking at time to hire and you’re looking at how long candidates are in stages, You’re looking at offer acceptance rate. You’re looking at attrition rate.

So if you don’t have that data, would try to get that. And then I also think you can look at qualitative feedback as well. What are your candidates telling you? What are they saying on maybe in Glassdoor?

What wherever it is that you can get qualitative candidate feedback. So I almost wanna say start there. But then after that, if you’re gonna start from the beginning, like, with the application process, clarity is key. Like, a very well written job description.

Now you could utilize AI to create job descriptions that are even better than you could probably at least better than I could write myself that are aligned with your company and all of that. So very clear job descriptions with real expectations, not wish list. That helps candidates self select. And then in our application, we actually are resume optional right now.

We don’t require a resume, though I would say 90% of people do submit them. But we ask really practical role relevant questions in our applications with signals we try to help it signal what we actually care about. So we really want people to be thoughtful about the application questions that they do. And we we do, at this point, you know, have a human reviewing every application to be looking at that.

Very nice. And with the application questions, how have you determined, like, what’s the appropriate amount of information to ask for at that time?

I wanna say, each of our applications probably have, like, five or six questions that are directly related to the role that we want people to be in. Honestly, I’m a fan of making applications, like, a little bit more friction. I think it’s very easy to hit the easy apply button, and then you just, like, blast out hundreds of applications everywhere. It’s very easy for candidates to take their resume and your job description and make it an absolute perfect match. And so I think at this point, especially because we are dealing with such high volume and, in some cases, like evidence of candidate fraud, creating a little bit more friction at the beginning of the process isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And, again, it’s about explaining to the candidates why. And I mean friction in this case is not friction for the candidates necessarily, but friction to so you’re raising the barrier to apply and making sure that, like, people who are applying are people who are serious candidates.

Yeah. And I think friction there is really just transparency. Right? You’re setting the bar. And I think too often people will think about candidate experience, and their first thing is remove friction.

Make it easier to apply. Make it easier to do this. Shorten the application, all those things. But and and maybe in some cases, that’s warranted.

But in other cases, the bad candidate experience is the one where the candidate gets to a recruiter screen, and there’s, like, complete misalignment on the job and what the expectations are and the hiring process and all these things. And it’s just it’s not only a waste of the recruiter’s time, but it’s a waste of the candidate’s time, which is really the negative candidate experience. So you add these things up front because you not only have to qualify the candidate to make sure it’s, you know, an investment that’s worthwhile to continue the hiring process. But you also have to, like, qualify their interest in the role.

I think that’s a challenge as well right now is so many people are applying. You not only have to see if they’re a fit, but you have to see are they actually interested in the position? And in some ways, it’s questions you need to ask, but in other ways, it’s also information you need to give because the candidate needs to also be able to make that decision if they’re interested in the position before they apply. So you kinda have to tackle it from both sides.

Yeah. It’s again, it’s going back to that question is, is this a process that top talent would want to apply for? And I would argue that top talent and the people that you want want a rigorous process.

So when I say, like, look for the pain points and eliminate friction in the process for the candidate experience, I don’t mean make it easy for anybody anywhere with any level of experience to apply. You wanna ensure that you’re tackling the friction points for people who you actually want in your company. So a rigorous process to me is not in conflict with eliminating friction. I think you need a rigorous process to ensure that you’re talking to and you’re spending time with the most serious candidates and that top talent and the people who really wanna be at your organization too.

Yeah. I think that’s you, described that so well.

There are many companies that don’t have the advantage of a Zapier brand that that often take the perspective of we have to unlock, you know, remove all friction everywhere to Josh’s point so that we can get candidates. But if the net result of that is that those because of that easy apply process, you end up with delayed you’re not getting back to candidates, you know, quickly enough. You you you don’t have a transparent process, all of those things. And, like, you actually have negatively impacted everybody that’s applying, including the really good ones that you’re after.

And and so it’s it’s easy to fall into that trap of, well, we’re gonna scare away our best candidates if we have them do something. But to your point, like, if they if they are indeed engaged and, they take pride in their craft and, you know, are looking for places where they can do that, like, they’re they’re going to be willing to work because they see that rigor. Like, they see that discipline. They see the transparency of what that looks like.

So I think that’s a really good call out for even organizations that are much smaller than Zapier that don’t have the the luxury of the Zapier brand as well.

And, Tracy, you mentioned the philosophy of every candidate has to hear from you every seven days. Yeah. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing you see on LinkedIn or anywhere you’re seeing candidates talk is about the proverbial black hole, of the hiring process. And some of that we talked about earlier in this call of just demystifying the process.

But the other side of it is you actually have to still communicate with your candidates, at some point within the process either to tell them they’re no longer being considered or where they stand. So unlike, at a tactical level on a day to day basis, you’re coordinating with the recruiting team, a bunch of different hiring managers, executives that are at the tail end of the process with all these different people involved.

How do you make sure candidates aren’t getting lost in the shuffle and that you’re able to uphold that seven day commitment?

I mean, I feel like the technology regard whatever ATS you have or even whatever system you have, like, is a way that you can ensure that you are responding to people. Like, I I I don’t know if I have really high expectation too high expectations, but I don’t see any reason why you should ever ghost a candidate. You should always let them know where they stand even if you only tell them at the end, hey. They didn’t make it.

There is absolutely no reason to not respond because it’s so easy to do so. This is where automation can really come into play. So with our seven day commitment, that doesn’t mean that we have necessarily an update if the candidate’s moving forward or not every seven days. We hope that we do.

We aim for that. But, like, to your point, sometimes decisions take longer. Sometimes we have to slow down a process. But we can at least say, hey.

I don’t have an update for you yet, but we’re hoping to get one for you soon. Or I don’t have an update for you yet. The hiring manager’s out of office. Whatever.

You can actually automate that message, or you can copy and paste that message if you wanna do it really manually and send it to all of your candidates. You can do a mail like an old school mail merge. Right? It I was doing this at Teach For America in, like, 2009.

So I know you can do a mail merge that just said, hey, everybody. We don’t have a decision for you yet. You there’s so many things that you can do to scale your processes to keep candidates engaged and to ensure that they know where they stand.

I just I don’t know. I just don’t think there’s any appropriate rationale for having candidates be go in a black hole.

Yeah.

I think it’s How you treat people?

It matters to you as a company, you just need to make it happen. Right? And so if it’s the most basic thing like you said bulk emailing everybody, that is still, not at a decision part of your process to tell them hey I have a no update update, stay tuned we’ll be in touch soon That’s one way to do it. Somebody I talked to a while back, and this is this always stuck with me, but they built into their recruiting team’s process.

They called it I think it was turned down Tuesdays and follow-up Fridays. So it was like, we go through all the candidates, like and if we haven’t sent them, like, you know, if the ones that are not moving forward, we have to send them some message to let them know. So that way, like, at the end of Tuesday, everybody that’s not moving forward is cleared out. We’ve sent them a message.

We’ve communicated. And follow-up Fridays is we either have an update or we don’t, but we’re sending something every Friday if we haven’t communicated with that person earlier in the week. And so it’s just these, like, simple practices you just have to build in. If it matters to you, you just have to build it in to your workflow.

Yeah. 100%.

Alright I know we’re coming up on time. Yes. We do have one question in here. Patrick maybe you can throw it up on the screen.

Take a second to read it here.

Yeah. That’s a good one, Lily.

It is a good question.

So for those who aren’t reading and perhaps listening, it was it’s related to the the technical side of this. So provide a better candidate experience by elevating the ability to have smart conversations with these technical candidates not coming off as just another recruiter screen while being also to better assess these qualifications?

So I think there’s two different ways you could go you could think about this. So if you’re meeting with highly technical candidates, let’s say for an AI engineering role or a machine learning role, just like any other skill you would need to understand that is important for that role, I think the recruiter has to know the ins and outs of that. And how you do that is you talk to the hiring managers and you talk to the team about what are the things that I should look for. So that’s not like a brilliant mind blowing answer. I think it’s just like if you were looking for a particular skill for any technical role, you have to understand as a recruiter what it is to look for, what that skill is, how does that work in practice, to be a thoughtful recruiter and ask the right question. So I don’t think AI technical skills is that different.

Now that’s on the technical roles. If you’re talking about generally how can you uplevel your TA team to be able to better understand AI fluency to assess it, like how I talked about mindset, strategic acumen, etcetera, generally across the board, then I think that’s about getting really clear, again, like what you mean by AI fluency for your company, defining that with your with the business, coming up with a rubric, and then training your TA team on that. I mean, we have an l and d team, and I’m sure you have enablement on your team as well, where you can actually just run your team through a lot of practice and calibration.

Here’s the things that you look for. Here’s clues. Our rubric that was created by someone on my ops team says, okay. Here’s what the the criteria is, but here’s, like, the clues that you look for.

Like, look for answers like this. Don’t look for answers like that. And so, again, I I it’s not a, like, rocket science answer. I don’t have anything more brilliant, but it’s really just thinking about AI fluency as any other skill that you’re trying to assess in the process.

How do you assess communication? How do you assess collaboration in your process? Right? You have to really understand what that looks like in the role, what it means in your company.

And I think AI fluency isn’t that different. I don’t know Josh, you have a better No.

That was I mean, look. I know we’re up on time. That was a great answer. We’re up on time.

I think that answer and just the entire webinar, everybody could see why Tracy and her team are crushing it so much. There’s there’s so much insight. We could spend hours and hours trying to extract all the knowledge you have out of you, but this was this was so awesome. I learned so much every single time I talk to you I feel like, I walk away with more TA knowledge and more ideas, and, we’re just so blessed to be able to connect with you this week as we had you on a webinar last week.

So I just can’t thank you enough for your time.

Yes.

Of course. Thanks for inviting me. This was great.

Thank you, Tracy. It was wonderful. Alright. We’ll stick around for a minute. But for everybody out there in the audience, we really appreciate you taking time out of your day, and stay tuned.

We’ll get you the the, AI snippets. Why not? Course. The the the highlights, we’ll get them out to you here shortly, but I really appreciate your time.

Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.